The Sound - Heads and Hearts

Heads and Hearts (1985) ***1/2

On first listen it's clearly a step down from previous Sound albums, but damned if I know exactly why.  The production's slightly glossier and the lyrics focus more on boy-pines-for-girl than usual, but cries of sell-out are misplaced:  the tone is, for the most part, as gloomily dour as All Fall Down.  The swirlingly downbeat opener, "Whirlpool," dispells those accusations forcefully, and the next two songs, the delusionally hopeful "Total Recall," and the Cars-gone-goth "Under You," both clear highlights, aren't any brighter.  The claims that the Sound have grown more happily poppier seem to rest on a mere handful of these eleven tracks:  "Love is Not a Ghost," a Psychedelic Furs-ish ballad that with its '80s saxes and banal love lyrics, actually is as conventional as they've gotten yet - still a fine song, though; the glass-is-half-full, "One Thousand Reasons," (to live); and possibly the closer, "Temperature Drop," which lyrically may stay positive, but the chilly frost pervading the atmosphere nullifies the words.  If there is one adjective to describe this album, that's it - chilly.  Frosty?  Icy?  Snowdusty?  A more important question is, are there any truly bad songs on this album?  The answer is predictably "No," as the Sound's greatest strength has always been their immediate accessibility and smooth hooky listenability.  The songs are, however, somewhat less immediately hooky than usual, and the album is frontloaded with the strongest material, though "Restless Time," stands as the most energetic slab of much-needed vital rock energy on this downcast and emotionally desolated album.  Perhaps that's it:  it's not so much the band performances and songwriting, which are still up to par, as much as Borland's moody depression has finally sunk into listless weariness.  He sounds tired, and drags the band down with him, despite the forced optimism of "Love is Not a Ghost," and a handful of other tracks.  Nevertheless, a highly underrated album, and most certainly not any sort of jumping the shark moment for the band.  It is a step down from previous albums, but hardly that drastic of a departure - there's no reason to not enjoy this one if you enjoyed the first four Sound releases, only slightly less so.



Eels - Daisies of the Galaxy

Daisies of the Galaxy (2000) ***

Well, it's a collection of songs - 15 in total, less than half of which go on for over three minutes, which makes the album come across as both fragmentarily incomplete and going on far too long.  Oh, of what importance is a conceptual framework:  what made Electro-Shock Blues such a triumph was the grim sense of mood and purpose that pulled the likewise short little pop tunes into a whole more important and cohesive than its parts.  Here instead we are left with a smorgasboard of most 2 1/2 minute little pop tunes, that's all:  some are better than the others ("Grace Kelley's Blues," "Jeannie's Diary,") and same as last time, E perversely leaves the most commercially potentialized track for last, "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues."  Not that it's necessarily the best track, but that "Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day," chorus seems tailor-made for airplay singalongability.  As you might have guessed, good news is that E's mood seems to have brightened considerably - some of these tunes might even be considered upbeat (the aforementioned single, the ecologically conscious "Tiger In My Tank"), and the overall mood is much lighter and frothier, musically if not necessarily lyrically.  The flip side of E's emergence into the light from morbid depression is that he's much less compelling:  now he's simply another singer-songwriter who lives and dies by the relative quality of his tunes.  And frankly, he's only inconsistently memorable, and I'm not sure if the pretty piano ballad, "It's a Motherfucker," would be memorable if not for the profanity of its title/chorus - in and of itself, melodically it's just sort of there.  Which you can say about most of these songs:  they're there.  More or less completely ditching the hip hop influence and only occassionally dipping his toes into hard rock territory ("Flyswatter"), this resembles the first two E solo albums more than the previous two Eels albums.  The album practically chokes on one over-orchestrated lush ballad after the other, which ensures a pleasant but perilously boring experience:  E provides enough moments of electricity to jolt the listener awake, but in comparison to the varied musical approaches of the previous release, this album suffers from too much of the it-all-sounds-the-same syndrome.  Ah well, E shows a more assured hand at lush pop than hard rock (see Beautiful Freak) but the songs are too hit and miss to earn a higher grade than that debut:  there's fragmentary, and then there's simply unfinished.

The Rainmakers - Tornado

Tornado (1987) **1/2

No, no, and hell no.  Whereas their debut could have sprung up in almost any random post-Creedence rock era, the followup's production dates it squarely to its inception in the dreaded Big '80s:  kids, this is what the word 'sellout' means and why it's considered a bad thing.  Never judge a book by its cover?  Hogwash.  You can tell how massive a step down in quality this issue is by comparing its airbrushed, big-haired cover to the inspired Thomas Hart Benton collage of the debut.  Synths are all over the place and music is sand-polished to remove any traces of Stonesy grit, leaving the Rainmakers just another big, fat heartland rock act like the Hooters or the Alarm.  Walkenhorst's songwriting still shines, perversely enough, and you can sort of tell how this could have, possibly, been a good album with more sympathetic presentation.  That doesn't make the rewrite of "Let My People Go-Go," the aimed-for-MTV (and it actually got played a few times, as I recall) dance floor, horns'n'all "Snakedance," any easier to take.  Like I said before, who the hell wants to be preached at about hellfire and damnation while they're committing the venal sin of club dancing?  But actually, with that and one other exception, Walkenhorst lays off the political pulpit thumping of the debut, for a less pointed set of songs.  "Rainmaker," makes for an effectively thundering anthem in a sub-Midnight Oil mode, as Walkenhorst lambasts an American people gone soft from too much ease and luxury.  It would make a dandy Ron Paul campaign jingle.  Not that I necessarily disagree, but me give up my video games, junk food, and episodes of The Walking Dead?  Uh-uh.  I'm just going to sit here and wallow in sloth, thank you.  The one other good song on this album is the band's very best ever tune, "Small Circles," an arrestingly affecting mid-tempo ballad that in a just world would have justified their attempted sell-out by becoming a smash (ironically, this LP sold worse than the debut - see what happens when you sell out and suck, fellas?).  Boy meets girl, boy drifts away from girl, boy regrets what could have been.  Two more points:  this preacher man appears to at least condone if not advocate pre-marital sex, and in the video, Walkenhorst (not exactly a matinee idol) wisely lets the more conventional pretty boy bassist Rich Ruth play the Romeo. 

The rest of this album can go to hell, more or less.  Clip those two songs and you've got a dandy A/B-side (should be obvious which of the two is more commercially viable).  The combination of glossy mid-'80s over-synthed production and Walkenhorst's redneck yelping makes for a highly unpleasant admixture.  Do I have any interest, remotely whatsoever, of anything this little Missouri bar band that couldn't, ever released again?  Probably not.

The Rainmakers - s/t

The Rainmakers (1986) ***1/2

How much you relatively hate this album (if at all) comes down to how allergic you are to Bob Walkenhorst's voice.  Coming across like Foghorn Leghorn blaring at a Midwestern tent revival, from the arresting Thomas Hart Benton cover on down this is as classic Americana as it gets this side of John Cougar Melonhead fronting the Band, with Walkenhorst presiding as a defrocked Methodist minister excommunicated for his love of dancing and other venal rock'n'roll sins.  And ever does he have the soul of a preacher in him, with a stiff-necked puritan lyrical stance condemning an American society grown fat, lazy, and drunkenly decadent as ancient Rome; and he's a fine, bordering on excellent (if only he weren't so bonecrushingly literal and straightforward), lyricist, which makes nearly all these songs highly memorable after only a few listens.  Which is good, because aside from Steve Phillips' fine crunching guitar work, the music is strictly workmanlike Midwestern bar band level.  It's Walkenhorst's songwriting that makes this album noteworthy, even though the band aquit themselves worthily if non-flashily:  the sound is laconicly dry Chuck Berry/stripped-down, pomp-free Springsteen derived hard basic rock, an appealing if completely derivative and predictable platform for Walkenhorst's pulpit thumping.  Two factors are a stumbling block for potential listeners, one of which I have stated explicitly - his voice, which can be nails-on-chalkboard in its heavily Midwestern yelp - and another which I've implied:  this is rock'n'roll, not a holy roller's convention, and smug sanctimony is rarely an attractive trait.  Nobody likes being preached at while they're trying to dance.  And the big hit (curiously, not in the U.S. for this quinta-beyond-quintessentially mid-American band, but in the U.K.) "Let My People Go-Go," has to rank as one of the oddest dance-floor smashes ever, with Biblically inspired lyrics featuring Moses exhorting his people to get down and boogie as one of the missing Ten Commandments.  Would that this album were half as interesting musically at is lyrically!  The album's other hit (in the world of rock critics and alt.radio), "Drinking on the Job," sports a litany of incredibly witty puns pairing occupations/slang for drinking:  the farmer got ploughed, the bricklayer plastered, the waitress tipsy, the terrorist bombed, security was tight.  Ironically enough, the witty singalongibility makes for a rip-roaring drinking song.  "Government Cheese," rips into lazy welfare dependents in that rarest of instances, a conservative right-wing rocker that manages to be as insightfully cutting as its couplets are amusing.  Let's see Ted Nugent use half of his remaing brain cell to come up with a song half as intelligent.  Weirdly enough, the band's biggest blunder comes with a completely out of character frat-boy lust anthem, "Big Fat Blonde," of which the less said of, the better (ugh, the title alone is gross).  About as sexy as Jimmy Carter announcing to Playboy that he'd committed the sin of lusting in his heart.  I guess they had to play it to entertain Kansas City college boys in Missouri bar dives.  The other big failure is the one song penned by guitarist Phillips, "Nobody Knows," which unlike all of the rest of the songs on the album, passes by as non-descriptly as its title.  Which underscores how vital Walkenhorst's lyrics and songwriting were to the band, in equal doses abrasively obnoxious with his nasally full-blast megaphone vocals and in-your-face political attitude, and for the same reasons impossible to ignore.  In other words, the Midwestern Young Republican answer to the Dead Kennedys' Jello Biafra?  Only Walkenhorst isn't nearly as radical to the right as Biafra was loonily to the left.  He's just a typical product of a solidly religious, small-town Missouri upbringing, with his rock-ribbed insistence on a return to the old-fashioned values of sobriety and hard work (ha, I almost misspelled that as hard rock) a parochial preacher's moral exhortation of his congregation, than a political call to arms.

Bob Spitz - The Beatles

It's physically impossible at this point in publishing history to have read every word of print devoted to the Fabs lest we live to the age of Methuselah, and the broad outlines of the story are familiar to all within the confines of Western civilization.  So if you're going to read one and only one out of the literally thousands (!) of books on the Beatles (I've read three; one was reviewed last year on this site, and the other one, The Love You Make, was gossippy crap), this is as close as we may get to a definitive take.  For starters, it's comprehensive:  864 pages, and they're long, small-print pages that take a couple of minutes to absorb, which clocks in at 864 pages x 2 minutes per page = ah, you do the math!  (And that's not counting the footnotes, appendix, and what-have-you that I didn't read.)  A great deal of attention is paid to the boys' pre-Beatles lives, particularly John's (let's stick to first names; we know these lads intimately enough to drop the surnames); in fact, we're well over 300 pages in before "Love Me Do," is released as a single.  Not that I'm complaining - the glimpses into the hard-scrabble lives of lower-middle and working class Britons during the post-war decades of harsh austerity are fascinating in a grittily tough-realist mode.  The image of Ringo beginning by banging on a jerry-rigged set-up literally composed of kitchen utensils is a wryly comic touch in the otherwise miserably Dickensian childhood of the poorest Beatle.  Anyway, summarizing the plot is too big of a bite for this little review; let's just say that the book does a fine job of balancing the weight of the material between the musical and personal aspects of the Beatles' story.  Musically, the sections on Revolver are unsurprisingly the most gripping, with George Martin wisely disregarding John's wishes to invite an actual section of Tibetan monks chanting for the chorus and have himself spun upside down in a circle around the microphone to sing the vocal for "Tomorrow Never Knows."  Ah, John - what a fucking prick.  Some naive Beatles fans have complained that this book is unfairly biased  against John - "He comes across as a total asshole!"  Well, I've got news for ya:  John Lennon was a total asshole.  His great talent and the fact that he was completely, nakedly honest about himself and his faults seemed to be the only genuinely likable things about the guy.  And the latter is only one aspect of his unrelenting narcissism:  the word 'solopsistic' doesn't even begin to describe John's worldview.  As one person once nastily quipped, he was the type of guy who thought that his own farts were significant (and put them to tape, and then released them on Apple with a naked Yoko Ono on the cover).  The other three generally come across as fairly normal guys.  Yes, Paul did have a bit of an anal control freak that comes out during the Let It Be sessions, and George obviously suffered from an inferiority complex (well, wouldn't you?), and Ringo....well, he was Ringo, a level-headed, bog-ordinary chap, rather boring if you admit it, but a necessary stabilizing foundation of bloke-ordinariness to John's madness, Paul's yuppie upward mobility, and George's flakey yogi-mysticism.  As for the 'fifth Beatle', Pete Best is seen flying off into an understandable rage when he gets news of the sack, before fading out in the mist of history; George Martin is presented as an old-fashioned, button-down English gentleman of the stripe that we sadly see too little of in this contemporary world; and Brian Epstein remains the most compellingly tragic figure in the Beatles story, a true victim of society and its intolerance if there ever was one.  If you're at all interested in the band, this is a must-read - don't let the heft put you off; you won't need to read another book on the Beatles ever again.  Because if this doesn't fully satisfy your appetite, phoney Beatlemania hasn't bitten the dust round your house.

The Sound - Shock of Daylight

Shock of Daylight (1984) ****

Now why did Borland & the boys wait until they were kicked off the majors & back on an indie label to start releasing the most commercial music of their career?!  The music is somewhat glossier & slightly poppier than their previous releases (certainly moreso than commercially disastrous goth-bomb All Fall Down, which earned them the music biz pariah status in the first place).  After three critically well-received but commercially dubious albums (I just realized I've used the word 'commercial' three times in the first three sentences - oops, now that's four) in 1984 nobody cared about the Sound.  They'd had their chance at the brass ring and blown it.  More's the pity for the public, as this six-song EP brings back the brite hooks missing from their murky third LP for a bracing blast of solid melodycraft that stands up to the best of their classic first two LPs.  Actually, if not for the one-chord wonder ballad, "Winter," which frankly is way too musically rudimentary and lacking in hooks & dynamics to not painfully drag, this is their most consistent release - all of the songs are not merely excellent, but the Sound at the top of their game.  The other quibbling flaw on this essentially flawless dish is that the Sound aren't making any major advances - any of these songs could have fit seamlessly on From the Lion's Mouth.  Taken as a whole, however, the mood conveyed is considerably brighter and upbeat, dare I say it happier.  "Golden Soldiers," rampages out of the gate as their most directly forceful anthem ever - it's, it's, it's so anthemic.  A bit disarming (no pun intended) in its direct simplicity as a raging anthem-rocker, but none the worse for it - one of their finest singles, in fact, and in a just world would be sitting pretty next to "Pride (In the Name of Love)" on '80s AOR.  "Counting the Days," likewise is unusually pretty and happy by their standards, a straightforward, sincere, mid-tempo chimer of a love ballad.  "Longest Days," "A New Way of Life," and "Dreams Then Plans," all sit comfortably in the mid-section between ballad and rocker, hard and dreamy, anthemic and subtle, moodily post-punk and commercially Big '80s.  (There I go again for a fifth time!)  All three sound kind of similar in style but are individually different enough to register as unique song-entities.  In fact, "Longest Days," may be my favorite track.  Let's listen! Dig that ascending guitar hook!

The Fall - Code: Selfish

Code: Selfish (1992) ***

As exciting and artistically a triumph as the 'whatever' lackluster album cover, this platter ain't too bad after a few digs in, but by no means essential (unless you're a completist, which all Fallanatics are by definition).  Balancing a tasteful measure of bracing techno-influenced guitar-rock with dollops of the smooth, tuneful Fallmuzak we were introduced to on the previous pair of LPs, the Fall break no new ground here and a great deal of this comes across Fall-by-rote.  Not that there aren't a handful of velly gouda songs-ah on-ah here-ah - if only the opener, "The Birmingham School of Business School," didn't drag on for six minutes, but it's the Fall in their patented draggy-repetitive-hypnotic mode, so what the hell - but you do have to be in the mood for the Fall in their draggy-repetitive-hypnotic mode.  Nice little nagging guitar lyrics and Mark's singing (ha ha ha) with passionate venom, a nice return to form after the sleepy mumblings of Shit-Work.  And hey, look, there's a Hank Williams, Sr. cover!  It's not that great.  Maybe I'm just getting burnt out on this band, but listening to this seems like too much of a chore.  Or maybe they were genuinely releasing sub-par material during the first half of the '90s.  It's hard to be objective in this case.  After enduring a couple dozen Fall albums, you'll understand the dilemma afflicting my critical facilities.  Or is that 'faculties'?  Anyway, I should mention two standout tracks that make the cut of my three-disc Fall mix-volume.  "Free Range," was the big hit single (well, in the U.K., and only a minor dent on the charts) and deserved to be, and ranks among their classic dance-rockers.  It's driving!  It's scratchy!  It's got Mark pitching it up to a voice-cracking squeal!  It pays to talk to no one!  No one!  "Gentleman's Agreement," sounds exactly like "Don't Bring Harry," era Stranglers.  Hey, wait - it is "Don't Bring Harry"!  With different words!  Still a nice little piano ballad, and despite the obvious source inspiration, works dreamily enough to earn its spot as the album's #2 track.  "Return," and the aforementioned "Birmingham..." and "Two Face," vie it out for the remaining Top 5 slots in a back-alley rumble.  "Married, 2 Kids," a fun rockabilly goof.  "Crew Filth," is nothing more than 5 minutes of random cussing, and "Everything Hurtz," is as painful as a hangover (maybe that was the intention).  13 songs.  About half of them are good.  Get it if you see it cheap, but only after the other fifteen much more essential Fall CDs.  No, I'm not going to list them in order of greatness.  Read the site.

P.S. One thing I've noticed about the Fall is that NOBODY can seem to agree on what their best and worst albums are.  I've never encountered a band whose fans and critics are so all over the place in regards to their ouvre.  But one thing we can agree on - "Free Range," what a song!  Whoop dee whoot!